Pictorial Magazine 65-100: Ethiopian students meet at Harvard, an Amharic sheet

An Amharic photo sheet headed "Pictorial Magazine," catalog date 5 November 1956, in the U.S. Information Agency file. Its headline reports a meeting of the Ethiopian Students Association in America at Harvard University, and five photographs show the members at a table, in a hall and in conversation, a large U.S. flag behind several of them (NAID 6949170).

The sheet

A masthead, one headline and five black-and-white photographs. The pictures show men and women around a conference table, in a hall, and seated in conversation, and in several of them a large American flag hangs behind the group. The body text and the picture captions are printed too small for the archive to transcribe.

ሥዕላዊ መጽሔት ።

በአሜሪካ የኢትዮጵያ ተማሪዎች ማኅበር በሃርቫርድ ዩኒቨርሲቲ ስብሰባ አደረገ ።

[English, as given by the archive:] Pictorial Magazine. The Ethiopian Students Association in America held a meeting at Harvard University.

In the file

The National Archives keeps the sheet in Record Group 306 with the U.S. Information Agency's posters for Asia, Latin America and the Middle East, under a catalog date of 5 November 1956. Its title carries the number 65-100. FRAME's maker line names the agency and its State Department predecessor program. The masthead names a magazine, not a government, and the archive classes the source as blurred. The recorded purpose is "Persuade or win support."

What is chosen

The archive's one tag is card stacking: the sheet offers a selection of cordial, orderly scenes as its whole account of the meeting. That is how a society page works, and it is a mild form of the technique. The archive does not suggest that anything shown is false. The question is what was left out, and the reader of the record cannot tell, because the body text and captions were not read.

The subject itself carries the message. Ethiopian students were studying in the United States, they had an association, they met at Harvard under an American flag, and the meeting was orderly. For an Amharic reader, the sheet presented America as a place where his country's young people were welcome to gather and talk. That may have been true for the people in the photographs. A wall sheet that does not say who sent it asks for more trust than one that does.

The program ran the same kind of story for other countries. Chitra Katha No. 20, a Bengali page for Dacca, covered a Pakistan Students Association convention at the University of Louisville. A later Amharic sheet, Pictorial Review, Volume II, Number 10, turned to Alaska and Hawaii statehood. The U.S. Information Agency hub lists Addis Ababa among the program's audiences.